Beginning compositing

Now if there is one thing I can recommend as you're getting started compositing,…it's to have plenty of patience.…All too often, people expect a composite to just be something simple.…You can drag it and drop it and don't you just add some switches and you're done.…And the truth is, no.…Most of the time when you add things into a scene, you're like, oh, what if I…did it this way or that way?…And there's a lot of backing and forthing.…So for our project, I'm going to show you how to build a composite between our…logo, which currently exists on this white background, and the 3D track that we…did at the very beginning in this chapter.…

So to get started, we need to actually import the 3D track project.…So double-click in the Project panel and navigate to your Exercise Files folder.…In there, you want to go in the Ch_12 folder and in the Desk_Track folder…you'll see a project named 12_02_Tracked_Desk.…This is a saved version of the final track that we created in the 12_02 Video.…So we can just click Open and notice that whole project got imported into its…

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Released

5/7/2012

In this course, author Ian Robinson introduces Adobe After Effects CS6 and the world of animation, effects, and compositing. Chapter 1 introduces the six foundations of After Effects, which include concepts like layers, keyframes, rendering, and moving in 3D space. The rest of the course expands on these ideas, and shows how to build compositions with layers, perform rotoscoping, animate your composition with keyframes, add effects and transitions, and render and export the finished piece. Two real-world example projects demonstrate keying green screen footage and creating an advanced 3D composition with the expanded 3D toolset, an important addition to CS6.

Topics include:

Setting up the workspace, important preferences, and the cache

Importing footage and comps

Relinking missing footage

Creating type, shape layers, and masks

Rotoscoping with the Roto Brush

Adjusting keyframes in the Graph Editor

Timing animations to audio

Building backgrounds with effects

Rendering with the Render Queue and Adobe Media Encoder

Animating 3D type

Smoothing shaky footage and retouching footage

Keying green screen footage

Working with 3D: extruding shapes, adding ray-traced lighting, and more